The SMART loop

The idea in one line: your sessions produce living artifacts, and those artifacts feed back into the session while it’s still running. The story below is the acceptance test - the feature is done when this works end to end.

The story: the live panel wall#

Marieke runs public participation for a municipality. Tomorrow: a day-long citizen panel on the new mobility plan - 8 tables, each recording via the portal QR, 10:00 to 17:00.

The evening before: creating the project is a conversation#

Marieke creates the project - and lands directly in a chat:

“Welcome to your project. I’ll help you set it up - start by describing what you’re planning, in your own words. (You can also skip this and come back any time, or read the docs and set things up yourself.)”

This is the project’s methodology at work. Every project starts on the default dembrane methodology: figure out what this project is for, and shape everything around that. If Marieke (or her workspace) already has methodologies of her own, they’re offered right here - “Start from Panel day v3, or shall we figure this one out from scratch?” - so a way of working she’s refined before is one tap away. The assistant interviews her - a few short questions, each with concrete options to pick from - and together they land on the project’s goal: surface concerns and suggestions per neighbourhood; final report structured by theme, formal Dutch. The goal is saved, versioned, and steers every report and artifact from here on.

Because she mentioned the event, the assistant asks one more thing:

“Your panel runs tomorrow 10:00-17:00. Would you like to let the dembrane team know? When they know an event is coming they can keep an eye on things from their side.”

She says yes; a heads-up goes into the team’s queue with the event time. Nothing is ever sent without asking her first.

Morning: asking for something alive#

“All 8 tables are recording until 5pm. I want a live overview on the big screen in the hall - themes as they emerge, a counter of voices heard, a fresh quote or two. Keep it updated through the day.”

The assistant proposes a loop - a card she reviews before anything runs:

Live panel wall - stays up to date through the day, until today 17:00 · pauses itself when nothing new arrives.

She applies it. The wall keeps itself fresh - every few minutes, quietly - and its design only changes when she asks. Every loop has an end: the assistant always sets one and says it out loud. Later she can say “pause the wall” in the same chat.

The wall appears#

The first run builds it: a dynamic canvas - theme tiles, a chart, a rotating quote, a live corner showing who’s recording - freshly generated by the assistant every few minutes, in dembrane’s look. It works through Marieke’s own access: exactly the 8 tables she can see, nothing more.

Live panel wall appears in the project sidebar, alongside her reports - same familiar shape: open it, watch it stay current, view it full screen on the venue display.

Every change is kept#

The wall has two kinds of change, and both are kept. Fresh data flows in every few minutes without anyone doing anything - those snapshots let Marieke step back through the day (the wall at 10:20 with two shy themes, the wall at 14:00 with six) and see how the conversation evolved. Changes to the wall itself - its design, what it shows - only happen when she asks, and each one is a new version, kept forever. Nothing is ever overwritten.

Feedback is just chat#

The wall’s quotes are too small from the back of the hall. Marieke opens the wall on her laptop and, on her phone, tells the chat:

“Bigger quotes, drop the counter.”

The next version reflects it. The assistant coaches this gently the first time - “you can ask me to change anything about this wall; each change becomes a new version” - because talking to your artifact is new, and it should feel obvious within one exchange.

Asking for something that doesn’t exist yet#

“Can each theme tile have a generated image? Something visual for the hall.”

The assistant checks what it can actually do (this documentation is its ground truth) and doesn’t bluff:

“Generated images aren’t something I can put in an artifact today. Can I ask two quick questions so the team hears exactly what you need?”

Two questions with options - what job the image does, what would work instead - and then, with her go-ahead, a detailed request goes to the dembrane team, carrying enough context to reach her back. Meanwhile the wall gets bold colour-coded tiles: the best version of what is possible today.

The loop feeds the room#

At 11:40 the wall surfaces a theme she didn’t expect - bus route 12. Before walking over, she taps refresh now on the wall to catch the very latest, then asks two tables to dig into it. The next refresh shows the theme growing. That moment - the artifact changing what happens in the session - is the whole point of the loop. Over lunch, runs report “nothing new” and skip the rebuild.

It ends cleanly#

At 17:00 the loop expires: one final version, marked final, the chat thread holding the day’s run history. “Turn today’s wall into the closing report” - and the report builder takes over, seeded by the goal and the artifact.

The day after: the way of working becomes reusable#

Reading the closing report, the assistant notices the shape of what Marieke did - setup interview, live wall during the session, themes probed in the room, closing report by neighbourhood - and suggests:

“This worked. Want me to extract it as a methodology? Next panel, you’d start from this instead of from scratch.”

She says yes. The assistant writes up Panel day - the reasoning behind the decisions, the goal template, the wall recipe, the report structure - as a methodology: versioned, hers to edit, selectable when she creates her next project. Over time her team refines it; version by version, it becomes how her municipality runs panels.

Weeks later#

A message lands in the same chat: “Theme images shipped - your wall can use them next session.” The request she made in the hall came back as a feature, to her, in the place she asked for it.

And quietly, the canvas-maker itself got better. What Marieke asked for - and what hundreds of other hosts asked their canvases for - taught the assistant’s canvas-building craft new moves. Her next wall starts from everything everyone learned.

What this needs (in plain terms)#

• Project creation as a conversation: a new project opens straight into its setup chat, with honest escape hatches (skip, come back later, read the docs).
• Methodologies: the way a project is run, as a thing you can name, version, select, and improve - starting with the default dembrane methodology, extracted from real projects when the assistant notices something worked, edited by you, and one day shared and published with evidence attached.
• Loops: recurring assistant runs with a cadence, a hard expiry, and a lifecycle you manage by chatting - propose, apply, pause, resume, stop. Every part of an artifact is a question being answered on a rhythm: “what are people talking about right now?”, “what are the themes?”, “how is the mood shifting?” - one answer every few minutes, each with its own pace, full history kept. Marieke’s wall tracks themes and a what’s-happening line side by side, and she adds or rephrases the questions by chatting. The one truly-live element is the monitor - dembrane’s existing real-time view - which can sit inside an artifact as a widget. You never have to think about any of this machinery.
• Try before apply: every change to an artifact shows you a preview right in the chat - with your real data when you have some, with clearly-marked sample data when you don’t - and nothing goes live until you apply it. For a full rehearsal, the assistant will walk you through a two-minute test recording you can delete afterwards.
• The dynamic canvas: a living page the assistant generates for you and keeps fresh - charts, tiles, anything a page can show, in dembrane’s look - with a refresh now button for the impatient moment. (Later: compose several frames, plain answers, and the live monitor side by side.) The page runs in a locked frame with no access to anything; the generation itself acts with your reading access and nothing more.
• A craft that compounds: the assistant’s canvas-building know-how is one shared, versioned skill - improved over time by what hosts everywhere ask for. Requests that can’t be met yet become the interviews and insights that teach it.
• Artifacts: report-shaped things that aren’t reports - versioned forever, regenerated in place.
• Feedback by chat: an artifact is something you talk to; every change is a new version.
• Honest gaps: when you ask for something that doesn’t exist, a short interview captures what you actually need, and - with your consent - the team hears it and can reach you back when it ships.

Related#

• Building now - everything else in progress.
• Chat & Ask - the assistant this builds on.
• Reports - the shape artifacts borrow.
• dembrane next - where the canvas beta is live today.